Whimsy is healing

Note: I will publish 2 blog posts this week, instead of the usual one, to celebrate having time off and in spirit of gratitude. If you enjoy the blog, please consider subscribing to the newsletter (subscription form is at the bottom of the website) - I am experimenting with sending out one newsletter each Friday and will be adding a tiny bit of newsletter-only content.

Heaps of stickers on my desk - these are from my Stickii sticker subscription, and the Stickii advent calendar.

At this very moment, I am drowning in stickers. My spouse Bogi is a sticker fan, and got a sticker subscription from Stickii — the Cute pack (I am not affiliated with Stickii in any way). The Cute pack is not my style, but the Pop and Vintage looked nice. So in spirit of sharing the love (and stickers), I subscribed to Pop, and we became a two-sticker pack household. Then Stickii advent calendar happened last year. We are Jewish, but Bogi’s birthday is on the 25th of December, so counting down to Bogi’s birthday makes sense. We did two years of Diamine Inkvent, but that was simply too much ink. The Stickii advent calendar was an experiment in 2022, and we are doing the Stickii advent calendar again this year. We ordered the bundle of all three and are opening an envelope a day since it arrived and until Bogi’s birthday. All that is happening while we are still subscribing to two Stickii sticker packs.

There’s a lot of stickers in here.

Stickers, research, and the Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age. I’m working on a translation studies project with a code name “Snail,” so snail stickers are thematic.

My academic colleagues are sometimes surprised when they see my notebook with stickers or doodles of dragons and birds and what not. It’s ok. Stickers help me spread a little joy. I’m always offering stickers to my students, and occasionally to curious faculty members. I don’t remember anyone saying no. It is a small delight. I love the more painterly stickers, the dreamy ones, and they do not seem as popular as other types of stickers. But stickers are cool.

Some surrealist painterly stickers by @welderwings and @frustrationsmear via the Stickii advent, and the Omas Dama fountain pen. There is a snail sticker here too.

It’s a common worry among my women colleagues and/or among my colleagues of color that they will not be taken seriously if they use colorful stationery or dress in colorful clothing. It’s a real and persistent thing in academia - there are colleagues who will intensely judge you, sniffing out every hint of whimsy as if putting a sticker, or G-d forbid, a bird on it will automatically downgrade your scholarship. It’s difficult to get through the tenure-track years with one’s joy intact, if graduate school did not kill it beforehand.

Academia is not the only field where one is expected to perform seriousness. Whimsy gets a bad rap in quite a few industries. But my stationery habit does not make me bad at my job, and I am prepared to stick a sticker on that hill.

And here’s a not so secret thing: I love my job, but I often imagine resigning to do something else. Publish fantasy novels, or open an antiques shop that sells only cat figurines, or run a barely functioning publishing house, or do linocuts. I could even go into middle management :) I’ve done many of these things — even without quitting my job! (Alas, not the cat figurine store yet, although I’m thinking about it). Things have been hard for so many people for so long, but the world is still full of juice and possibility.

(I would be a natural as a curator of the cat figurine store. Actually it’s a bookshop - me and the cats would have a grand old time selling obscure academic volumes. I might have written about such a bookstore already).

In the stationery hobby, we love our objects. It’s not about things all the time, though, for me. Mindfulness is a fashionable word these days, and maybe wonder is a kind of mindfulness - being called to pay attention to the way a vintage nib flexes, or to admire a perfect blue-black ink. Like a skeleton key that fits that one faded blue door, the art of noticing opens a gateway to wonder.

I’ve had a lot of trauma in my life. Some of it happened because of my immigrations, and wars, because of politics; some because of bad choices, because of earlier trauma, because of other people. I don’t know where I’d be, but wonder saved me - with every maple in the rain and every curl of candlelight. And I am not alone. In a different life I could have painted my own tiny miniatures in my journals, but out there, elsewhere, in towns and continents close and far away, other people have painted beautiful things and turned them into stickers. When I put one into my notebook, I am a part of that magic. Things cannot be hopeless as long as we have art.

And I am sure of one thing - whimsy is healing. And our world has a lot of healing to do.